Ripwave Media Streamer Does it All

Two-year old RipWave has come out with the ultimate media streaming machine. Not only can it rip your Blu-rays and DVDs to its hard drive, you can add a cable card or off-air antenna and use its hard drives as a DVR. It can also stream videos from most any video streaming website using the PlayOn server or stream to other devices using the Plex DLNA server.

Models names follow the surf theme. They are offering a dedicated movie player model, the Tsunami for $2000. The media player line can also play music and photos and includes the Stingray with 3 to 12 TB of storage, the Barracuda, and the Orca with 9 TB up to 30 TB of storage.
The software menus are as impressive as the hardware features. Users can choose from a number of graphic menus from a carousel to a grid to extensive information about a movie that displays metadata from 7 different sources. The menu options make it one of the truly intuitive devices as each user can choose the view that is easiest for them to use.

The Ripwave is the best media server I've seen yet. Let's see if it performs as well as its first impression.

This company just installs XBMC on poorly built computers and then tries to sell them as "media servers". There are better options out there for half the price. And options ten times as good and more reliable for the same price. The company is also basically non-existent if you google search them also. I visited their booth at CEDIA and discovered quickly they were clueless about anything involving media servers. I even quizzed one of the workers there and he didn't even know what RAID stands for. Scary CEDIA even let them exhibit.

It appears as if they are in multiple lawsuits which are common knowledge and can be searched.

Apparently the "executives" are not engineers or have any design clue, they just apparently pretend to partner/work for companies, promising to do one thing or another for very cheap work, and then steal the companies, or start competing companies and contact all their customers.

So far 2 separate companies in 2 separate states have been identified to be either pressing charges or about to against the individuals "Alex" and "Matt" that run this company.

Hi Tracydell,
This short blog was in no way a real review of the Ripwave produce. As you can see, it was part of our CEDIA 2013 coverage. As such, it was commentary on the cool features they demonstrated at the show. The owners have contacted me several times to try out their device but I have yet to get one.
Will do some research on this and report what I find. Thanks for the heads up.
Barb G

Barbara, Did some more research and spoke with the blog master. Apparently RipwaveMedia is NOT Rip-wave. Rip-wave was the company who presented at CEDIA. Ripwave Media stole technology and designs from Assassin HTPC who they had previous connections to and are actually using their technology (www.AssassinHTPC.com has exhibited at CEDIA for several years now - and are currently suing Ripwave Media). And then they took the name Rip-Wave Media in efforts to scam regular Ripwave customers. The original Rip-wave company has been forced to take down their media server product offerings from their website until they can finish building their own lawsuit. All in all, I would STAY AWAY. When a company is being sued by MULTIPLE other companies for fraud and theft, that says a lot. The blog designer said if you contact either of the other companies involved they would verify this statement.

I own Audio/Video Service company and was contacted by this company several months ago and am just now getting to writing this review in hopes others will learn from my experience.

They contacted me via phone and I was intrigued by the claims of what their system "could do" and agreed to do a "live online demo". Their system was buggy and laggy on the demo. They claimed it was due to the internet, some parts (i.e. live TV) weren't even setup for me to see but they claimed it was just due to them not having it installed and activated on that particular system. Some of the features worked. Others took lots of setup and manipulation, others didn't even come close to working.

I should have taken those as warnings to stay away. (I did not see the BLOG link on thie website until afterwards but wish I would have).

They offered a discounted "demo unit" dealer price they said was 100% refundable if I did not like the system.

I couldn't get my money back fast enough.

It BARELY did 10% what they offered. And when it did, there were always issues. Metadata not pulling up, having to manually do tons of things. Its NOT a install and forget it type of system. It is an Install and have the customer call you every day for issues type of problem.

The build quality was extremely poor. The parts they are using aren't proprietary by any means and not even the best parts on the market. In speaking with them, I don't think anyone in the company has actually computer knowledge but just read a "how to build a computer" guide.

The best part is, we had a problem with our system, and when we told them what the error we were having they came back the next day with a solution. The best part is, when I typed our problem into Google, it was word for word what they wrote back. Literally Copy-Paste.

I found out that was their "support" department.

Its literally like they went to Best Buy, purchased parts, built a computer and put a free media player on it and are trying to get people to buy into that they have a device of their own.

Roku's for $100 add more value than these.

Luckily I got my money back, I'm not sure if it was needed but I did threaten that I would just cancel the charge if they didn't credit it back. But they did. However, not the hours and days dealing with this headache. If I could bill them for the false claims and time wasted I would.